CMPnet's NetGuide Names Best and Worst of the Web

Posted on December 8, 1998

To close out 1998, NetGuide's team of writers, editors, producers, and designers have debated the merits (and flaws) of thousands of sites. The result is the NetGuide 99, the Web's best and worst 99 sites, according to NetGuide, in 22 categories, ranging from the serious (Best News Site) to the superfluous (Best Guilty Pleasures Site).

The report says, "This year some sites tried to add too many bells and whistles while others `dumbed down' the look of their sites in an attempt to appeal to users with browsers from 1994. But some of the developments we liked were easier navigation, faster-loading pages, and more ambitious personal homepages."

Highlights from the NetGuide 99:

• Best News Site: CNN - "Despite stiff competition from other news sites, CNN is still our favorite...."
• Best Guilty Pleasures Site: Musings of the Gus/Randomly Ever After - "A Virginia slacker turned San Diego computer programmer, Gus is arrogant, obsessed with technology, dirty, usually drunk, and prone to rambling on and on about things like dead seals and the subtext of Jerry Springer video..."
• Most Improved Site: AOL (the Online Service) - "We'd never thought we'd be saying good things about AOL either -- but the new Version 4.0 is a real doozy..."
• Best Site for a Start Page: Yahoo! - "This ubiquitous portal has a lot of what you want -- and probably a lot of what you don't..." Worst Site: CondeNet: "The website for Conde Nast's magazines, is god-awful..."